Braying donkeys

A peek at the archives of Mapai, the Israeli Labor Party whose current leaders can’t decide if their strategy is to outflank Netanyahu on the left or on the right, helps confirm my reservations about its founders and early political figures: They prepared the ground for Israel’s current slide into fascism.

An op-edarticle in Haaretz quotes directly some of those leaders’ statements in the first two decades of Israel’s existence as they formally debated the issue of what to do with us, the Palestinians who remained within Israel’s indeterminate borders. The striking absence of any Palestinian from all these deliberations must have permitted the participating Jewish leaders to speak their opinions frankly, perhaps to a fault. But, again and again, they broached the subject without reaching a clear and actionable decision.

Their inaction on the matter became policy and their indecision emerged as the final decision that coalesced into the practice and strategy of Israel’s consecutive governments regardless of which party ran the show. One could cut the atmosphere of ill will that the archives document with a knife. It provided the springboard for all manner of state legislative and administrative maneuvers that were to follow to disempower and pauperize us, the subjects of their reported debates.

Such steps have gained in number and extent under the current administration. Under the current administration, settler colonialist aggression in the Palestinian Occupied Territories spills back across the erased Green Line to find us still our old Palestinian selves. Even if we don’t declare it, most members of our community are in full sympathy with the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) campaign. Little has really changed since those archived discussions. Except that the venom is now spewed openly from public forums and official media instead of the secretive discussions behind closed doors.

The archives document the clear split in the views of the Labor Party’s founding leadership on the matter of how to deal with us, the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Mind you, we were not called that but rather “Israel’s Arabs.” In a way, that was an indication of fairness: Calling us ‘Palestinians’ would have prejudiced the discussion beyond repair. Still, no one is reported to have questioned the expulsion of the absolute majority of the original population of what became Israel across the borders. That issue was closed for good. Any member of that group, the majority of the Palestinian nation at the time, who dared cross back to his home was an infiltrator who should be shot on sight.

The word ‘Infiltrator’ at the time was as inclusive of all expelled Palestinians and as threatening as the word ‘terrorist’ is today in referring to Palestinians. All Israelis and their leaders took that for granted. Surviving liberal Israelis from that era, such as the lead peacenik, Uri Avnery, to this day, draw a line after 1948. They see the problem starting only in 1967 with the occupation of West Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank.

Repeatedly, the Labor Party leaders returned to debating our future: we the Palestinian minority citizens of Israel. The dominant stream in the Labor Party, led by David Ben-Gurion, vacillated between relating to us as dogs or as donkeys. Levi Eshkol saw clearly where such the discriminatory views of his party were leading:

“It would not surprise me if something new suddenly emerges: that people will not want to rent a stable – or a room – to an Arab in some locale, which is the [logical] continuation of this situation. Will we be able to bear that?”

The present-day answer to this question– hypothetical and unbelievable in the 1960s– is in the affirmative: Scores of official Rabbis living on government salaries do order their followers to practice such racism.

Another minority view at the time was expressed by Moshe Sharett, a minister in the Ben-Gurion government (and the second prime minister of Israel), who wanted Jews to accept that “Arabs are not dogs but human beings.” Others in this minority faction had even more forthright objections. Pinhas Lavon, for example, in 1955 summed up his objection to the way Israel treated its Arab citizens by stating bluntly that “Nazism is Nazism, even if carried out by Jews.”

The dominant faction led by Ben-Gurion took a dim view of the presence of any Palestinians in Israel despite the honeyed language about guarantees of equality for all citizens in the country’s 1948 declaration of independence. Obviously, the father of the country never trusted Arabs. He kept them at an arm’s distance even when he politically accepted them as allies in the mini-parties that Mapai created, financed and managed, to the point that their parliamentary representatives were known to vote without knowing what subject the vote was about. They didn’t have the language facility, and their bosses didn’t provide translators. But the bosses would signal to them when to raise their hands.

Now, finally it all comes out. Ben-Gurion knew his clientele. As late as 1962, he declared: “We view them like donkeys. They don’t care. They accept it with love…”

I remember well some of those donkeys. I can still hear them bray.

Ben-Gurion’s three best known protégés had to deal with the existential threat any remaining Arabs would constitute for the emerging state. The one who had it easiest was Yitzhak Rabin, not quoted in the current article. In his memoirs, he reports that when he asked his mentor what to do with the civilian population of Lydda when he conquered it in 1948, the answer was eloquently simple: a flick of the boss’s hand. They were efficiently expelled. The debate to which we are finally privy relates to the 15% or so minority that remained in Israel, not to those expelled.

Moshe Dayan, the West’s beloved poster boy of Israel’s violent birth, shines again with his unapologetic aggressive style as recorded in the archival documents. He does not mince words:

“I want to say that in my opinion, the policy of this party should be geared to regard this public, of 170,000 Arabs, as though their fate has not yet been sealed. I hope that in the years to come there will perhaps be another possibility to implement a transfer of these Arabs from the Land of Israel, and as long as a possibility of this sort is feasible, we should not do anything that conflicts with this.”

Contingency plans—‘drawer plans,’ they are called in Hebrew military parlance—continue to exist in Israel for driving us out to a neighboring Arab country under cover of a media blackout in case of war. ‘Another possibility’ Dayan called it. Perhaps one day, a war could be started to finally implement such a vision of racial purity in Israel.

Absent such opportunity, Israel’s current leaders continue to formulate laws to achieve our virtual transfer, fully neutralizing any influence that the country’s Palestinian citizens may have had so far while delaying the contentious physical dislocation part for the time being.

What I find objectionable, perhaps even more than these war-crime scenarios, is the flippant cleverness of Shimon Peres, the third understudy of Ben-Gurion and Israel’s famed international peace advocate who introduced nuclear armament to the Middle East. His view of the 15% of the native Palestinian population who stayed in their homes against Israel’s wishes would be entertaining if it were not so sad; he is reported to have been unimpressed by humanitarian and international responses to our suffering under military rule (from 1948-1966). In his view not only was that military government “not a strain on the Arabs,” but it was effectively created by the Arabs– “who endanger Israel and as long as that danger exists, we must meet it with understanding.”

That sounds like a mere explanatory footnote to Ben-Gurion’s statement at the same Mapai Secretariat meeting on January 5, 1962:

“The moment that the difference between Jews and Arabs is eliminated, and they are at the same level … Israel will be eradicated and no trace will remain of the Jewish people.”

Hold your horses, man! How does that add up? Where is the logic in what you say? Even though you were my enemy I held your IQ in high regard. But let me translate what you just said for Americans:

“If the difference between the white settlers and native Americans is eliminated, and they are at the same level, … America will be eradicated and no trace will remain of the white race.”

Or even, “no trace will remain of followers of the Christian faith.”

Aren’t you saying the Jewish people = Israel=Zionism=Apartheid?

About Hatim Kanaaneh

Dr. Hatim Kanaaneh is a Palestinian doctor who has worked for over 35 years to bring medical care to Palestinians in Galilee, against a culture of anti-Arab discrimination. He is the author of the book A Doctor in Galilee: The Life and Struggle of a Palestinian in Israel. His collection of short stories entitled Chief Complaint was released by Just World Books in the spring of 2015.

And the roots of “Nazism” were firmly established in Palestine during the late 19th century with the arrival of foreign Zionist Jews who viewed the indigenous Palestinian Arab inhabitants as less than human.

The mistreatment of Palestinians by Jewish settlers caused Jewish philosopher Ahad Ha’am (nee, Asher Ginsberg) great distress. In 1891 he wrote: “They treat the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, unscrupulously deprive them of their rights, insult them without cause, and even boast of such deeds; and none opposes this despicable and dangerous inclination.” (Ha’am, Ahad, by Am Sheideweg, Berlin 1923, vol.1, p.107; quoted by David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, p. 24)

Ha’am concluded that this aggressive behaviour on the part of Jews stemmed from anger “…towards those who remind them that there is still another people in the land of Israel that have been living there and does not intend to leave.” (Hans Kohn, Zionism Reconsidered, Michael Selzer, ed. London: 1970, p. 195; quoted by Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians…, p. 7)

The die was cast:
Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir declared during an interview with the foreign editor of the London Sunday Times that “it was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine…and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” (Sunday Times (London) June 15, 1969)

In the view of another prime minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir, the Palestinians are of no more significance than insects when compared to Jews: “From this mountain top and from the vantage point of history I say that these people [the Palestinians] are like grasshoppers compared to us.” (The Independent, April 1988, from Reuter, Tel Aviv; cited by Michael Rice, False Inheritance, Kegan Paul International, London and New York, 1994, p. 127).

While delivering a televised address to his Likud party in 1989, Shamir further maligned Palestinians by describing them as “alien invaders of the Holy Land…. They are brutal, wild alien invaders in the land of Israel that belongs to the people of Israel, and only to them.” (New York Post, February 6, 1989)

During a speech to the Knesset, Menachem Begin, Israel’s sixth prime minister, referred to Palestinians as “beasts walking on two legs.” (New Statesman, 25 June 1982)

Regarding Palestinians residing in the occupied West Bank, Raphael Eitan, then Israel’s Chief of Staff, declared: “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle…. We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.” (New York Times, 14 April 1983)

Prime Minister Ehud Barak: “The Palestinians are like crocodiles, the more you give them meat, they want more…” (Jerusalem Post, Aug. 30, 2002)

Rabbi Perin, in a eulogy for Baruch Goldstein, in 1994, stated : “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” (New York Times, Feb. 28, 1994)

Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, the spiritual leader of the Shas party and former Israeli Chief Rabbi, described the Arabs as “serpents” and in his Passover sermon, he stated that “the Lord shall waste their [the Arabs’] seed, devastate them and vanish them from this world. It is forbidden to be merciful to them. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable.”

“They don’t wish to physically harm Palestinians. They only wish to deprive them of their basic human rights, such as self-rule in their own state and freedom from oppression.”
By Zeev Sternhell, Jan. 19/18 – Haaretz

EXCERPT:
“I frequently ask myself how a historian in 50 or 100 years will interpret our period. When, he will ask, did people in Israel start to realize that the state that was established in the War of Independence, on the ruins of European Jewry and at the cost of the blood of combatants some of whom were Holocaust survivors, had devolved into a true monstrosity for its non-Jewish inhabitants. When did some Israelis understand that their cruelty and ability to bully others, Palestinians or Africans, began eroding the moral legitimacy of their existence as a sovereign entity?”

Vergangenheitsbewältigung – “In Germany, and originally, the term refers to embarrassment about and often remorse for Germans’ complicity in the war crimes of the Wehrmacht, Holocaust, and related events of the early and mid-20th century, including World War II. In this sense, the word can refer to the psychic process of denazification.” – wiki

When all the designed brutality and racist beliefs of Zionists and Zionism is fully documented and exposed to the world and the process of dezionification occurs, I have to believe all those complicit in the crimes against the Palestinians and the world will feel a collective shame and guilt (some (perhaps the liberal zionists) more than others no doubt). I wonder what the word will be in Hebrew to coin this sentiment.

Nakba memorials and museums will hopefully keep alive the memory of all the brave souls who fought Zionism’s excesses and serve to deter and combat against racism just like all the Holocaust memorials and museums throughout the world have so effectively done . Never again right?

In the racist logic of the 40s the Palestinians were considered a backward people. Zionism is based on a hypertext which considers them thus. Zionism is a made up culture which has no room for Palestinians and no room for universal values .
It is a long way from Hillel.

The Palestinians were supposed to fade into history. The occupation was based on this.

That’s true. And Nazism is Nazism, even if carried out by Europeans and Arabs.

“Put a bomb in the Jewish Agency Buildings
Wipe the Synagogues all off the earth,
and make every damned son of ZION
Regret the day of his birth.
From the lambasts hang all the RABBIS
But hang HERZOG highest of all
And when you have hung all the Jewboys
Then blow up their damned Wailing Wall…
You will find you are down as the Heros
Of the last and the greatest Crusade
And then you will all go to HEAVEN
And we all charge our glasses,
AND DRINK TO JEW THERE IN HELL.”

Flyer circulating in Jerusalem, 1948, and anonymously signed “AMO”–Arab Military Organisation, and adjunct of the Mufti’s Arab Higher Committee.

That’s true. And Nazism is Nazism, even if carried out by Europeans and Arabs. … ||

I agree. And I say that all Nazis – Jewish, European and Arab – should be held accountable for their actions.

But Jewish, European and Arab Nazis all have their defenders – people like you:
– who believe that their group has a right to do evil;
– who believe that evil is virtue if their group does it; and
– who justify their actions with “murderers exist, so it’s OK to rape” whataboutism.

“Pinhas Lavon, for example, in 1955 summed up his objection to the way Israel treated its Arab citizens by stating bluntly that “Nazism is Nazism, even if carried out by Jews.””

The only conclusion from Lavon’s statement is that Zionism was Nazism from the get go. Not the full blown Auschwitz-Nazism, but more the like a piece of the road that led to it.

And then there is this from John Quigley’s book “Palestine and Israel: A Challenge to Justice”, p. 30:
“To quell the Jewish Agency revolt, Britain used the Defense (Emergency) Regulations. In 1946 Dov Joseph, a future minister of justice of Israel, denounced them before the Jewish Lawyers Association. ”There is no guarantee to prevent a citizen from being imprisoned for life without trial,” he said. The government may “banish any citizen at any moment.” A decision to banish, he complained, was taken administratively: ”a man does not actually have to commit an offense; it is enough for a decision to be made in some ofﬁce for his fate to be sealed.” The regulations authorized “collective responsibility,” he complained. “All of the six hundred thousand settlers could be hanged for a crime committed by one person.”

Yaacov Shapira, another future minister of justice in Israel, said the regulations led to a situation “unparalleled in any civilized country. Even in Nazi Germany there were no such laws.” To call the military tribunals that conducted trials under the regulations “courts,” he declared, was “mere euphemism”. Moshe Dunkelblum, a future judge of the Supreme Court of Israel, said the regulations “violate the basic principles of law, justice, and jurisprudence. They abolish the rights of the individual and grant unlimited power to the adminstration”.

The same emergency regulations that the Zionist Apartheid Junta has imposed unto Palestinians since day one. Again, “Even in Nazi Germany there were no such laws”.

Ben-Gurion – “We view them like donkeys. They don’t care. They accept it with love…”

Not sure I have ever read anything so racist and from a leader of a country at that. Psychologists call this “Projection.”

“Projection is a symbolic process by which one’s own traits, emotions, dispositions, etc are ascribed to another person. Typically accompanying this projection of one’s own characteristics onto another individual is a denial that one has these feelings or tendencies.”

Good riddance – hee haw hee haw

Thank you Dr. Kanaaneh for a well written and informative read and all the hard work done to make the lives of Palestinians better.

“Not sure I have ever read anything so racist and from a leader of a country at that. Psychologists call this “Projection.””

Sheesh. Last time for me.

Ben Gurion was not speaking for himself, he was speaking in the voice of his political opponents in the Knesset, who felt that the Arabs had been cowed (can I say that?) by martial law. Ben Gurion didn’t believe the Arabs were complacent, and that they would rise in revolt as had happened in Algeria.

Martial law had been imposed on Israel’s Arabs because of ‘infiltration’ by refugees, and a low intensity border war with Israel’s Arab State neighbours. It’s generally agreed, that the martial law restrictions went on for longer than was necessary.

… Ben-Gurion persistently defended the military government, which he saw as a deterrent force against the Arabs in Israel. In a meeting of the Mapai Secretariat on January 1, 1962, he railed against the dominant naivete of those, such as Sharett and Aran, who do not understand the Arabs, and warned of the possible consequences:

There are people living under the illusion that we are like all the nations, that the Arabs are loyal to Israel and that what happened in Algeria cannot happen here.

He added, We [the military government] view them like donkeys. They [the Arabs] dont care [about martial law]. They accept it [martial law] with love… To loosen the reins on the Arabs would be a great danger, he added: You and your ilk – those who support the abolition of the military government or making it less stringent – will be responsible for the perdition of Israel.

Ben Gurion – wearing his Captain Israel underpants – was deriding “kinder, gentler” Zionists over their concerns for the well-being of what, to him, were no more than “donkeys”.

Right. If the Arabs were complacent donkeys, the martial law restrictions could be lifted.
If the Arabs weren’t complacent donkeys, BG’s argument, than restrictions must remain.

Thanks! ||

I’ll assume that you’re just pretending to be stupid and I’ll spell it out for you:
– Martial law (ML) has been imposed.
– “Soft” Zionists say it’s unfair to the Arabs and should be lifted.
– Ben Gurion (BG) says Arabs can’t be trusted, so ML must remain in place.
– But BG says that’s OK because his government views the Arabs as donkeys who “don’t care” about ML and, in fact, “accept it with love”.
– He warns the “soft” Zionists that to lift ML (to “loosen the reigns” on the Arabs/donkeys) would result in Israel’s downfall.

jack, when citing a source (as eljay did in citing haaretz), it’s generally accepted that using brackets “[..]” (vs “(..)”) indicates the person editing (in this case eljay) is adding their own text within those brackets. furthermore, eljay answered you earlier when he stated “See my post of January 24, 2018, 9:11 am”. iow, he added the brackets, and his interpretation, inside of them.

That’s funny “Jackdaw”, I was sort of thinking that about you. 55 years in the US, and now a scant five years in Israel, and you will do anything, even spend hours at Mondoweiss to avoid the company of Israelis, and speaking Hebrew.

Since we now know that it was Eljay who added brackets and ‘military government’, does anybody besides him believe that BG meant ‘military government’ when he said ‘we’, because it is less than clear to me what he meant.

This can happen to any “Jew haters” junkie and then they need to increase the dosage. If this is to expensieve for you try and fabicrate some by yourself. I’m sure that DaBakr can help you. He knows the recipe and his fabrication amount has almost reached industrial scale.

Hatim Kanaaneh is disingenuous in the extreme. He cherry picked the donkey quote and takes it completely out of context. Mondoweiss laps it up this swill.

Just what did Ben Gurion REALLY say about the Arabs being ‘donkeys’?

First off, he wasn’t calling any Arabs ‘sub human’. Being Gurion spent close to his whole life among Arabs; workers as well as effendis, and nowhere in his many writings does he come close to calling any Arabs ‘sub human’. Ben Gurion spent a good part of the 1930’s in secret dialogue with Arab leaders, including the Mufti. See Ben Gurion and the Arabs, by Shabtai Teveth.

The ‘donkeys’ remark was made in the context of a political discussion about whether to lift martial law restrictions off the Arabs of Israel. Some MK’s were for the removals, Ben Gurion opposed them.
What Ben Gurion was saying is that some MK’s believed that the Arabs in Israel had been beaten down into quiescence, like ‘donkeys’, and that the martial law restrictions could now be removed.
Ben Gurion seems be saying the opposite, that the Arabs in Israel are not beat down ‘donkeys’, loyal to the State. That the Arabs were resentful and vengeful and would violently rise up against the State the moment the restrictions are removed. Not donkey like behaviour at all.
I see donkeys every day, and they are placid beasties.

“John, did you ever invite Palestinians into your home to break bread? Ever, John?” jackduh

Actually , many Palestinians have been invited to break bread with me but they always had an invitation and arrived at the agreed time.

Not once did they arrive at 2 am armed to the teeth and ready to break everything in my House not to mention crapping all over my bedroom , slapping my wife and children around, (some of whom they hauled off to prison ) and generally acting like hooligans.

Now ask me if I have ever invited a zionist to my home to break bread with me.

Disprove what I just said about BG and the donkey quote, or shut your hole.

LOL, or whatcha gonna do big shot?

anyway, i did read the haaretz article. i guess i fail to see where hatim took it out of context, nor do you cite him, you just accused him.

First off, he wasn’t calling any Arabs ‘sub human’. Being Gurion spent close to his whole life among Arabs; workers as well as effendis, and nowhere in his many writings does he come close to calling any Arabs ‘sub human’.

maybe not, but he did call them donkeys. besides, hatim didn’t use the term ‘sub human’ so your argument here is specious.

What Ben Gurion was saying is that some MK’s believed that the Arabs in Israel had been beaten down into quiescence, like ‘donkeys’, and that the martial law restrictions could now be removed.

yeah we know that, and we know his response was “To loosen the reins on the Arabs would be a great danger, he added”. again with the donkey metaphor.

it sounds to me like what your complaint amounts to is “BG liked donkeys, he respected to donkeys, for him to call palestinians donkeys is a compliment.”

Not donkey like behaviour at all.

so why do you think he called them donkeys then? when he said “We view them like donkeys. They dont care. They accept it with love” don’t you think he meant that palestinians accept and love being viewed like donkeys? hatim is a palestinian, i don’t think he loves it. try grokking that.

Have we anything to go on except the HaAretz report? Th.e individual remarks are sometimes hard to follow and span a puzzling length of time. However, we do seem to have a discussion in which the Israeli leadership considers. in rather cool terms on the whole, keeping Palestinians in a subservient state: a rather horribly pragmatic calm pervades this discussion of a rather outrageous thing. Well, the excerpts may be misleading. I would have interpreted BG’s remark, which in its English rendering is quite cryptic, as saying, rather flippantly, that the Palestinians (as he would not have called them) are used to a subordinate and slightly servile existence, are being treated well by their own standards and so are reasonably content with what Israel imposes on them. To my mind, that is a little racist.

Read it yourself.I wont call you a moron.I don,t wish to insult morons.

“Ben Gurion advocated for maintaining martial law against the Palestinian minority up to the last second. In 1962, he derided those like Sharett who lobbied for its repeal. He called them “naïve” and argued that they didn’t “understand” Arabs. He warned of what might happen in outrageously racist terms:

There are those living under the illusion that we are a nation like all other nations, that the Arabs are loyal to Israel and what happened in Algiers cannot happen here.

We look at them [Palestinians] like donkeys. They gratefully take what we give them. It doesn’t matter to them.

You and those like you [who support the end of martial law] will be responsible for the destruction of Israel.”BG

Unfortunately you still haven’t managed the first sillable, Jackdaw. It’s “Talk” -“back”. “Talk” like in “to talk”. Your IQ seems to be even lower than 51. Is this maybe the result of brain damage caused by encephalitis Zionica? Or Ziocane abuse – do you have the feeling that you are used to Jew haters?

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